People First Settled in Villages?

¶ … people first settled in villages?

People settled in villages for several reasons. First, they were mostly related in blood to the other people in the village. Then, similar looks, customs, ways of dressing, speaking and cooking kept familiar people living near each other. As families grew, so did the village. Families lived in huts close by so that they could help each other. Women helped other women with childrearing; cooking, gathering firewood, growing crops, and tending to the sick, aged and their husbands. The men banded together in groups to hunt, make weapons, defend the women and children, build homes and make decisions about the future with others. Growing crops made the families live in the same area for many years, until the firewood ran out and the land ceased to be fertile. Then the whole village would move.

Scholars give the name culture to the way of life of a people, including its arts and crafts." Customs and ways of building, dressing, practicing their religion, cooking and doing other elemental things in one's society keep similar individuals and groups together. Similarities in costumes, wearing hair and style of decoration tend to keep groups of similar customs together, though migration of groups changed the way people dressed and looked, with other styles influencing them (Encyclopedia p 75).

Another reason for settling in a village is linguistics. When groups grow up together they understand each others' language. When they meet others from outside the village or the area or region they live in, they do not understand the language as well and feel alienated. The language one knows tends to keep people who speak the language together. As groups migrated, languages spread. Songs and music, stories and myths were outgrowths of the linguistics of a tribe.

Animals had a lot to do with villages. If the villages raised domestic livestock, these were cared for by members of the village in turns and necessitated cooperation between the residents. Individuals could raise livestock, but they needed to have large families in order to do so, hence the need to live near others, either family members or neighbors who also raised animals and could cooperate.

Why has it been relatively difficult for scholars to study the Indus valley civilization?

Because the languages of the ancient people have not been translated until fairly recently (some are still being translated), scholars have found it difficult to study the history of the Indus Valley civilizations. In 2006 a stone axe with script from 1500 BC was found near Mayiladuthurai in India by a schoolteacher which help scholars discover more about the past. From the Neolithic age, 3,500 years ago, the polished stone is engraved with four signs which have been identified by epigraphists as Indus Valley script (Subramanian 1). But this axe is not the only artifact which has been found to add to the mystery. Dozens of seals with writing, stones and pots with writing on them have also been found which have not been deciphered.

Ancient seals containing signs and sometimes script recognized as Harappan have been found in more than a dozen places. But because there is no bilingual key, it is difficult for scholars to translate any of the ancient seals that have been found in various parts of the Indus Valley. The substrate language is unknown, as is the language family it belongs to. The seals contain very few signs each and there has yet to be found a "Rosetta Stone" giving scholars a parallel writing with more than one language, so that the "code" can be broken and the ancient scripts can be translated.

Describe the geographic extent of the Roman Empire when it was at its height.

The Western Roman Empire reached its apogee in 476 when Emperor Romulus Augustus was deposed by Odoacer (the first Barbarian King), the Roman legions were withdrawn from Germanic lands in order to defend Italy from Alaric I, and Justinian I tried to regain the west without success.

The sixteen provinces of Rome, established from AD 46 through 227, were Sardinia and Corsica, Hispania Citerior Hispania Ulterior Illyricum, Macedonia, Africa, Asia, Achaia, Gallia Citerior, Gallia Narbonensis, Cilicia, Syria, Bithynia and Pontus, Cyprus, Cyrenaica and Crete, Numidia and Mauritania. Added to those, under the emperors, were Rhaetia, Noricum, Pannonia, Moesia, Dacia, Britannia, Aegyptus, Cappadocia, Galatia, Rhodus, Lycia, Judaea, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Armenia and Assyria (Gill 1).